ARCHITECTURE

Kitsch Dallas: Why is the city of the future stuck in the past?

On a sunny morning a few weeks ago, I gassed up the car, picked up an architect friend, and together we hit the road on a quest to visit the landmarks of colonial America.

Moving rapidly, we made our way from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, stopping along the way to see Thomas Jefferson’s work in Charlottesville, Colonial Williamsburg, Independence Hall in Philadelphia — the Liberty Bell is in remarkably good condition, I am happy to report — and First Baptist Church in Providence, a meeting house in blinding white completed in the years just before the Revolution.

It was quite a journey, and all the more impressive in that we completed it in the better part of a morning, allowing time for a leisurely lunch before my companion was due back at his office. You can make the trip yourself with minimal planning. All the landmarks we visited, or more accurately, facsimiles thereof, can be found a short drive from downtown Dallas and within the city limits, on the campus of Dallas Baptist University.

This bizarre architectural theme park, set amid the rolling hills adjacent to Mountain Creek Lake, is something of a microcosm of Dallas, a city that is continually reproducing the architecture of yesteryear even as it seeks to position itself as a paradigm of modernity.

The design philosophy of Dallas Baptist is the brainchild of the school’s longtime president, Gary Cook, though he might attribute it to an even higher power. In a new book on the campus, Cook recalls a message received during a visit to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in the late 1980s. “I felt as if the Lord was telling me we could build a building that was similar,” he wrote. Inspiration is a funny thing; even the great modernist Mies van der Rohe claimed that “God is in the details,” although he preferred I-beams to quoins.

Alas, the details at Dallas Baptist are not quite divine. Proportions err toward the clumsy. Vinyl window frames and stamped-metal moldings are but poor imitations of the real. The centerpiece chapel, the one modeled on Providence’s historic First Baptist meeting house, sits not in the midst of a judiciously landscaped mead, but behind a concrete sea of late-model automobiles. The chapel itself is named for Bo Pilgrim, the chicken king wont to don a Colonial-era buckled hat on TV, which seems appropriate. Ersatz architecture, brought to you by an ersatz pilgrim.

Bo and Patty Pilgrim Chapel at Dallas Baptist University

Patriotic folly

While this is not a scene that Joseph Brown, architect of the original church, could have imagined, it is perhaps worth noting that even he had copied its design from an English pattern book. If nothing else, this illustrates the folly of promoting Georgian architecture — a style that draws its name from the very English kings against whom the Colonials revolted — as somehow inherently patriotic.

Buildings make for difficult subjects, open to multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Colonial architecture may read to some as patriotic, but what of the fact that so many of our founders were slaveholders? Should this be a consideration when erecting a campus in that idiom adjacent to the Potter’s House, one of the city’s largest African-American ministries? The University of Virginia would also seem an odd model for a school with a “Christ centered” educational program, given that it was founded by Jefferson as an essentially secular institution.

A city’s insecurity

Dallas Baptist’s audacious pastiche makes it an easy target, but it’s hardly an anomaly in Dallas. Perhaps because the city is at once so insecure about its history and yet so bent on prestige, it has often looked elsewhere for architectural validation. This has brought trophy buildings by architects of international reputation along with a penchant for brazen works of kitschy historicism. Sometimes, as in the case of the Crescent, Philip Johnson’s steroidal chunk of Paris on the prairie, they have come in the same outlandish package.

If you’re feeling generous — extremely generous — you can find a bit of campy humor in this type of architecture. There’s something intrinsically absurd about the faux White House that is the broadcast center of the Trinity Broadcast Network, one-time home of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker; it sits incongruously among the car dealerships and fast-food chains along the route in from D/FW Airport. You pass it not long before you reach another blast from the architectural past, the Dallas Infomart, a mammoth clone of London’s Crystal Palace. Within this 19th-century archetype lies the hardware of the 21st.

Trinity Broadcasting Network

Campy vs. mediocre

Not all kitsch is campy, however. As Susan Sontag noted in her defining essay on the form, camp suggests either naivete or a certain wink-wink, nudge-nudge knowingness. The enemy of camp is mediocrity — the boring, the self-serious, the self-satisfied. There is, for example, nothing particularly campy about American Airlines Center, a turgid hangar with a dreary circulation system.

No less egregious is the Old Parkland office development now rising inexorably along the foot of the Dallas North Tollway. Grossly out of proportion, inward looking and driven by no ideal greater than mammon, it is a perversion of Jefferson’s academical village at the University of Virginia, on which it is modeled.

Old Parkland office development

But you need not take my word for it. In an 1805 letter describing his intentions for the academical village, Jefferson wrote: “Large houses are always ugly, inconvenient, exposed to the accident of fire, and bad in cases of infection.”

Today, we might adjust Jefferson’s injunction: Large buildings, designed and sited appropriately, can encourage the kind of density and vitality that make cities appealing. The primary dangers posed by big houses today are not so much fire and infection but inefficiency, lack of sustainability and the fracturing of community that is a product of sprawl. Jefferson’s own Monticello was not quite small, but it was modest in its own way, an architectural “laboratory” where he might experiment with the challenge of integrating technology and aesthetics.

That ambition is too often lacking today. Even as we have adopted advanced technology and design in almost every aspect of our lives, our homes still seem stuck in the past. As one friend put it recently, you don’t drive a Ford Model T, so why build a Colonial Revival House? It’s not just a question of style. Contemporary design should respond to the ways we live now, taking advantage of the materials and technologies of the present.

Debased modernism

But at this point, modernism is too often merely a “style” and one that we see regularly in a debased, kitsch form. Banal, overscaled and dated, it has become the default product of architects and developers grown complacent in fat times. The proposed Two Arts Plaza, a generic glass box with a few extruded sections — hello, 1986! — is a glaring example of this type of unimaginative thinking; its realization would be another deadening blow to the Dallas Arts District.

At least that project is still on the boards. Drive around a bit and you will find developer kitsch kudzuing all over the city. The effects have been especially egregious in Uptown and the West Village, which are now overrun with shlocky apartments, often with some historical detailing tacked on. These developments are targeted at students and young professionals justifiably happy to have a reasonably walkable neighborhood close to work where they can live near friends and night life. Call it “bro-chitecture.”

We have even institutionalized kitschy mediocrity. Conservation districts, established with the eminently reasonable intention of preserving the integrity of historic neighborhoods, have done so in part by mandating that new construction conform to historical architectural styles. This is a practice that runs counter to national preservation standards, as it inevitably breeds confusion between the new and the genuinely historic. It’s one thing to demand that a new building respect the scale and character of a neighborhood, quite another to demand that it be dressed up in Colonial Revival dress.

Mountain View

Our tour of Dallas Baptist left time enough not just for a late lunch, but a side trip to Mountain View College, which sits on a lush South Dallas site adjacent to the Dallas National Golf Club. In 2009, Mountain View opened a new student center, a tiered building with a moat designed by Virginia-based Dewberry. We were not there to see this decidedly strange confection — think pagoda meets regional airport — but to look instead at the original campus buildings, which opened in 1970.

Mountain View College student center

We found a pair of self-effacing terraced buildings, expertly if modestly detailed, that mirror each other across a ravine. A pair of broad sky bridges connect the two, offering students pleasant views and comfortable study spaces. The language was that of a corporate campus or an upscale mall, which was not accidental. The buildings were the work of the Dallas architectural firm Harrell and Hamilton (now Omniplan), which was also responsible for NorthPark Center, designed in the same period.

Here was a welcome rejoinder to Dallas Baptist, a vision of collegiate architecture that was not quite Jeffersonian, but respectful of both the native Texas landscape and the students for whom it was designed; a serious place for serious people prepared to engage with the contemporary world in a serious way. That is to say, the opposite of kitsch.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a professor at the UT-Arlington School of Architecture. Follow him on Twitter at @marklamster.